The great purpose of human art, the great end of human study, is to obtain ease, to throw the burden of labour from our own shoulders, and fix it on those of others. (William Cobbett)

Friday, 4 May 2012

Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism

The son of Thomas Arnold, the founder of
RubgySchool immortalised in Tom
Brown's Schooldays, Matthew Arnold, 'though no mean poet, probably achieved
greatest fame as a literary critic.

His two collections of essays, published nearly 20 years apart, comprise both
more general pieces, such as his seminal "The function of criticism at the
present time", and sketches of individual authors, including Byron (of
whom he gives a useful corrective evaluation) and Shelley (who he puts the boot
into for his womanising).

Three of Arnold's benchmarks for great literature were that is should have
meaty content pertaining to what he called "high seriousness", that
it should function as a criticism of life and that it should convey its weighty
matter in the "grand style" by attaining near perfection in form and
diction.

Even those who criticise him for being unable to apply in his own work the
disinterestedness that he called for in other critics appreciate the
comparative method that he applied to poetic studies. Many people would also
agree, at least in broad terms, with his ranking of the titans of literature,
with Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Milton and Goethe to the fore. (Virgil appears
not quite to have made the grade.)

Again, many would not quibble with his relegation of the likes of Shelley and
Byron, even if his judgments on Shakespeare - too little high seriousness - and
Keats - too many sentimental letters to his fiancee - are particularly
contestable. Like almost all critics, Arnold was at his best when writing about
writers he particularly admired, who in his case were often foreigners little
known in Britain (for example, Joseph Joubert and Heinrich Heine).

Arnold's
"big picture" approach and his penchant for the epigrammatic style
make him particularly fruitful in terms of quotations.

Thus, from his "Pagan and medieval religious sentiment":

"I wish to decide nothing as of my
own authority; the great art of
criticism is to get oneself out of the way and to let humanity decide"

which is a great
soundbite even it has been rarely practised (least of all by Arnold himself).

And this on his fellow
Victorian Lord Macaulay from his essay "Joubert":

"Lord Macaulay was
a born rhetorician; a splendid rhetorician doubtless, and, beyond that, an
English rhetorician also, an honest rhetorician; still, beyond the apparent
rhetorical truth of things he never could penetrate; for their vital truth, for
what the French call the vraie vérité, he had absolutely no organ;
therefore his reputation, brilliant as it is, is not secure. Rhetoric so good
as his excites and gives pleasure; but by pleasure alone you cannot permanently
bind men's spirits to you. Truth illuminates and gives joy, and it is by the
bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men's spirits are indissolubly held."

Who would be content
merely to dub a rival "the great Apostle of the Philistines" when you
can write like that?